I had MySQL 5.5.15 running on OS X Lion, deleted it, and tried to install 5.5.17. I have run into problems that I cannot solve.
To begin with the end, I can run start mysqld with the skip-grant-tables option and connect with mysql. If I issue the command select * from mysql the result returns an empty set. This squares with the following finding. I had thought that lost passwords caused problems and ran the procedure for updating the root password that is set forth in the MySQL documentation. The procedure executes, except that it says that 0 rows were updated. So I assume that the user account root does not exist on the machine. There is a mysql user account on my Mac, but there may not be a mysql user entry in the user table. If I try to connect to the server with the mysql command when the server is started in the ordinary fashion I get the error message Access denied for user 'martin'@'localhost' (using password: NO) ditto for commands like mysql p u root mysql u root and the like. I should add that I followed Rob Allen's instructions for completely uninstalling previous versions, and theoretically speaking there should be no traces of earlier passwords on my system. But I'm not sure. I should add that I also followed the Post-installation steps inPaul Dubois's MySQL, and I noticed something odd. According to him, if you have a .tar package you need to run the mysql_install_db script. If you have a .dmg package, the installer runs it for you. When the .dmg package had the problems I described above, I tried a fresh installation from the .tar package. But the command bin/mysql_install_db user=mysql does not work , and in fact there is no script by that name in the /usr/local/mysql/bin directory. In short, in my installation there seems a gap between mysql and mysql, and I can't find any good explanations for what I might have done wrong or how I could fix it. I'll be grateful for any help.